Moonwalking with Einstein – Joshua Foer
Thoughts: I’d heard about Moonwalking with Einstein for several years, and had not made an effort to read it because I figured, it being written by a Memory Championship winner, it mostly addressed how to memorize isolated facts. Every time I saw it mentioned, however, it was accompanied by a rave review, so when I came across the book in a library, I figured I would give it a shot. In the end, while it dealt mostly with techniques for abstract feats of memory—memorizing the orders of decks of cards, series of random numbers, and so on—it also contained a bunch of stuff that was more widely applicable, and was an enjoyable read too. Glad I picked it up!
Takeaways: To make anything more memorable, try to find or create a vivid image with which to associate it, especially one that evokes strong emotions and/or involves multiple senses. For memorizing series of things with a defined order (prime ministers of Canada, say, or credit card or telephone numbers), memory palaces can be useful.
(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)
Foer, Joshua. 2011. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Penguin.
One: The Smartest Man is Hard to Find
Two: The Man Who Remembered Too Much
- 44: the Baker/baker paradox: show someone a picture of a man and say either that he is a baker or that his last name is Baker. Wait a few days, and show the person the picture again. If the person was told the man’s profession, he’s much more likely to recall the word “Baker” than if they were told the man’s last name.
- 45: people generally have more associations with bakers than with the last name Baker, so the fact that someone bakes is much more likely to become embedded in a thick network of associations.
Three: The Expert Expert
Four: The Most Forgetful Man in the World
- 77: “Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”
- 81: “Scientists generally divide memories broadly into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit).” n.b.: When I’ve tried to relate this fact to others in the past, I’ve presented a confused pair of terms even as I’ve gotten the general idea right.
- 81: “Within the category of declarative memories, psychologist to make a further distinction between semantic memories, or memories for facts and concepts, and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives.”
- 82: “Our memories are not static…. Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged. ¶ But in the process, we also transform the memory, and reshape it—sometimes to the point that our memories of events bear only a passing resemblance to what actually happened.”
Five: The Memory Palace
- In a nutshell: humans encode spacial memories very effectively, and also visual memories. You can harness this fact in order to remember basically anything: associate it with a vivid image, and then imagine that image in a specific location in some space you’re familiar with (that space is known as a memory palace). To recall the thing, think of the location within the memory palace, find the striking image, and then associate back to the thing you are trying to recall.
- 94: “Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training—indeed, nearly all the memory tricks in the mental athlete’s arsenal—were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium”, written ca. 85BCE
- 96: Mary Carruthers, “the author of two books on the history of memory techniques”. These could be The Book of Memory, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (a collection to which she seems to have contributed an essay), and/or The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures
Six: How to Memorize a Poem
Seven: The End of Remembering
- 147: “In his essay ‘The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,’ Robert Darnton describes a switch from ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ reading that occurred as books began to proliferate.”
Eight: The OK Plateau
- 164: The “Major System”: associate each arabic numeral with a consonant sound (or pair of similar consonants). To remember any number, convert it to a series of consonants and then find a word with those sounds in that order.
- 165: The “Person Action Object” (PAO) system: Each ordered pair of digits from 00 to 99 is associated with a person doing a memorable action with a memorable object. To remember any ordered triple of ordered pairs, take the person from the first pair, the action from the second pair and the object from the third pair and synthesize them. Replace ordered pairs of digits with single playing cards in order to memorize a deck, three cards at a time.
- 169-170: Paul Fitts and Michael Posner’s three-stage model of skill acquisition:
- 1. “cognitive stage” - actively thinking about the task and discovering new ways to accomplish it more effectively.
- 2. “associative stage” - concentrating less, making fewer big errors, gradually becoming more efficient
- 3. “autonomous stage” - on autopilot
Nine: The Talented Tenth
- 208: “It takes knowledge to gain knowledge”
- 209: “it goes without saying that intelligence is much, much more than mere memory…, but memory and intelligence do seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition. There’s a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.”
Ten: The Little Rain Man in All of Us
Eleven: The U.S. Memory Championship
Epilogue
Posted: Dec 29, 2024. Last updated: Dec 29, 2024.